In the five decades since “On the Road” first appeared in print, Jack Kerouac has proven troublingly elusive for any devotee searching for signs of the writer’s ghost in his old Queens haunts.The novelist, who penned what would become the bible of the Beat Generation, lived for 12 years in Queens — spending six years with his mother and father in Ozone Park, then another six with his mother in Richmond Hill.
There, he not only wrote long portions of his famed travelogue, he also used Ozone Park — fictionalized as Paterson, N.J. — as the real-world departure point for his cross-country travels with counterculture icon Neal Cassidy (aka Dean Moriarty) in “On the Road.”
The borough is teeming with other reminders of his literary genius. Yet, walk into any Kerouac landmark today, and you’re likely to encounter anything from polite dismissals to blank stares upon mentioning his name.
“You want to know about Kerouac?” asked an employee in the flower shop that sits below the writer’s former Ozone Park apartment. “Plaque’s around the corner,” she said, pointing to the front door, which leads to a small wooden memorial hanging inconspicuously on the side of the building.
At the bar across Crossbay Boulevard, where Kerouac and his father used to drink together, one patron simply shrugged at questions about Kerouac. Another scoffed.
“That’s the type of reaction I just don’t understand,” said writer Patrick Fenton, when asked of Kerouac’s posthumous absence from his old stomping grounds. Fenton was responsible for getting the plaque erected in 1996, after spending years studying Keroauc’s connection to Queens.
“This is where he planned an incredible adventure, where he came up with this great American novel. Now, it’s like some people could care less.”
“A plaque,” he added, “isn’t enough.”
The only fitting memorial for the so-called “Wizard of Ozone Park,” he believes, would be an entire literary trail across Queens, replete with dozens of signposts detailing the real-life experiences Kerouac had at each location and fictionalized in his work.
Where would such a trail start?
Possibly at 133-01 Crossbay Blvd. There, Kerouac penned his first novel, “The Town and the City” in the “cursed kitchen” of his mom’s apartment where, just months before, he had witnessed his father succumb to stomach cancer. The home was also where Kerouac, at age 25, set out for San Francisco, Calif., on the first leg of the classic journey that later became the subject of his novel.
Kerouac lived with his mother, Gabrielle (fictionalized as his aunt in the book), on the second floor of what used to be a drugstore from 1943 to 1949.
Today, the Ozone Park building is home to a flower shop and the Lindenwood Volunteer Ambulance Corps, which occupies the back rooms and top floors. The kitchen where Kerouac stayed up until dawn for weeks, writing “The Town and the City,” is now the emergency call center. The upper left window was his bedroom, and passers-by could often hear piano melodies pouring forth from the jazz-lover’s room on summer nights, according to Fenton.
“There were a lot of brilliant ideas hatched in that room,” he said.
Now, the only visible evidence of such brilliance is the wooden plaque outside.
Across the street is Glen Patrick’s Pub, formerly McNolte’s Tavern, where Kerouac used to spend evenings playing shuffleboard and drinking beer with his father. Old friends recalled how the family would eat Gabrielle’s French-Canadian stew at night. During dinner, the young writer would often run across the street to McNolte’s to have them fill a tea kettle with beer for her. Over drinks, Kerouac would then start reading from his latest manuscripts, Fenton said.
Today, the bar’s only memorial is also a creation of Fenton’s — a framed 1997 Newsday article he wrote, hung on a wall near the back door.
Shortly after his father’s death, Kerouac moved with his mother to 94-21 134th St. in Richmond Hill, where they lived for another five-or-so years.
With no breadwinner in the family, Gabrielle took work at a Brooklyn shoe factory — leaving Kerouac alone to entertain the “wild” writer friends she so often shunned and barred from her old apartment in Ozone Park.
One was Cassidy, who often came to play basketball in a nearby park. The pair could often be seen running down opposite sides of Atlantic Avenue, tossing a ball back and forth, diving into hedges.
Another regular was beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who used to join Kerouac on walks over to the Van Wyck Expressway, where the pair would stare down at the traffic, while discussing each other’s work.
According to Fenton, the author loathed the Van Wyck and often complained to Ginsberg about how it had ruined the neighborhood.
Perhaps that’s why Kerouac chose such an ugly location to set the final farewell between Moriarty and Sal Paradise (the author’s alter-ego).
Moriarty is incoherent and lost when Paradise abruptly leaves him standing near the corner of Atlantic Avenue and the Van Wyck, marking an abrupt end to their deep friendship. “I waved back,” Kerouac wrote. “Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight.”
No marker commemorates that spot, and Fenton believes no other place deserves it more.
“People need to know more about these places,” he said, as he listed the possible benefits of a literary trail. “For people who grew up here, it would be a point of pride. ... If you bring tourists here, it’s a way to make money.
“If you bring high school students and tell them what happened here in the book — and if that inspires just one kid to become a writer, that’s perfect.”
